inSpirenteractive

inSpire
is pleased to introduce this new feature that invites our readers to
share ideas/stories with other readers. For each issue, we will pose a
question (some serious, some light-hearted) and give submission
details via email. To receive the questions, alums should sign up at
http://www2.ptsem.edu/alumni/change.htm and non-alums at
http://www.ptsem.edu/read/inspire/subscribe.htm.
We’re thankful to those who sent in entries for this debut, are sorry
we could not print all of them, and look forward to hearing from many
of you in the issues to come!

Sincerely,
The Editors

What is a favorite memory of a Christmas pageant at your church?

*In Wide-Eyed Wonder

Just a month before Christmas, my colleague was installed as a pastor
at our congregation. At their former church, his wife and teenage
daughter had been very involved in liturgical dance, so it was decided
that as part of the Christmas Eve worship service they would
liturgically dance to “O Holy Night,” as my colleague sang that
beautiful Christmas carol. It was the first time that dancing had been
part of this service.

As my colleague sang, the women danced. Out of the corner of my eye I
glimpsed one of our two-and-a-half-year-old worshipers slip away from
her parents and slowly, ever so slowly, make her way up the chancel
steps. She came and stood directly in front of me. Her parents started
to leave their seats to retrieve her, but I motioned for them to stop,
letting them know all was well. I was ready to grab her in case she came
too close and into harm’s way.

The child stood, eyes and mouth wide open in awe and wonder, as she
watched every move the dancers made. Tears came to my eyes and to the
eyes of many others who experienced this epiphany. Oh, if we all could
stand, eyes wide open in awe and wonder, as the Christ Child comes to
us, into our hearts, each Christmas and each day of our lives.

“Jesus said, ‘Truly, I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom
of God like a little child will never enter it.’”

I was young and ambitious; I wanted a Christmas pageant. I wouldn’t
take “no” for an answer. I had been at Farringdon Church for only a few
months and was busy rebuilding the Sunday school from the ground up,
welcoming dozens of new members into the congregation, and reorganizing
everything. (Now that I have been at Farringdon for 15 years, I realize
what I did to those poor people. But being Canadian, they were too
polite to object.)

The night of the Christmas pageant arrived. We were not prepared. The
cast looked their parts, but did not know their parts. Ten minutes
before curtain, Imogen, the little girl who was cast as Mary, broke down
and cried. I did my best to assist her in her time of need. It was then
that I realized that instead of “Mother Mary comforts me,” I was
comforting Mother Mary! Oh well, “let it be.”

As a quite proper but self-conscious middle-aged woman was giving
Christmas program directions to the children assembled before her, men
were stretching a coiled wire across the front of the platform, from
which would hang a stage curtain. As one of the men tried to loop the
wire into an eyehook, it slipped from his hand and whipped across the
auditorium, catching the corner of the woman’s wig (which had been a
secret) and throwing the wig over the heads of the children.

One year we were low on angelic-looking primary students, so the
senior high youth group was given the task of putting on the pageant.
The expectation was that the youth would do something nontraditional or
contemporary, but that was not to be. Many were from a local children’s
home (abused and runaway kids), and the idea of a traditional pageant
was comforting for them, not “cute” or “corny.” It was a symbol of a
childhood they had never known.

The group chose as Mary one of the girls from the children’s home:
16, tough as nails, and a leader of the others. She took the role to
heart and spent hours on the realistic costume, even borrowing a “sizing
pad” from a local maternity store. So it was on Christmas Eve that our
“Mary” appeared in the doorway looking all the world like an about-to-be
teen mother. As the interracial Mary and Joseph walked hand-in-hand down
the aisle, shopping-cart donkey in tow, I heard a sharp matriarchal gasp
behind me, along with the whispered words: “Oh my God, she’s pregnant!”

Suddenly, I understood the story as never before. This is what Mary
faced: the scorn, the shame, the hushed comments. The following year,
the youth group was replaced in the pageant by young children, who
embody the story’s charm, but none of its scandal. To me, however, Mary
will always be a streetwise teenager, who walked down the aisle with her
head held high and her face absolutely shining.